The 10 Cocktails That Made My Career: Dave Arnold

With Dave Arnold, it starts with a simple question—tips for making a superior gin and tonic, perhaps—which then quickly spirals into a one-sided rumination on the ideal lime juice for the drink: Clarified or cloudy? (Clarified.) But isn’t that difficult? (Yes, it has low pH and it can’t be heated.) So what do you do? (Quick agar clarification, or use a centrifuge). But…which is better? And this can go on. The phone call ends with you scrolling through eBay hunting for used medical equipment, because Dave Arnold makes spinning shit fast sound not just fun, but also imperative for the future of drinking.

In gastronomic circles, Dave Arnold is the technologic phenom who identifies and solves dilemmas—especially those not so obvious—with the help of gadgets, a few he actually invents himself. His encyclopedic knowledge of all things food lends him gravitas, but his exuberant mad-scientist curiosity makes stuff fun. Take the Searzall, the hand-held broiler he designed for the home cook, a fixture you attach to a goddamn blowtorch. This Lynchian film demonstrates its function (and shows off Arnold’s impressive eyebrow acting), evenly finishing everything from eggs to scallops. (Pro-tip for cubicle-dwellers: It comes in especially handy for delicious desk nachos.)

Instead of directing his talents towards creating molecular tasting menus, Arnold tends to focus on better ways to get drunk. His Manhattan cocktail bar, Booker & Dax, initially a lab for developing new cooking devices, was opened in partnership with another boundary-pusher in David Chang. Alongside centrifuges and liquid nitrogen at the bar, Arnold utilizes an updated loggerhead of his own invention, an electric poker that both provides visual pyrotechnics and utilitarian function: burning off base alcohol for stronger flavor, and caramelizing the sugar for a toasty profile. But like a true tinkerer, there’s always room for improvement. In his book Liquid Intelligence—a James Beard-winning bible for home-cocktail enthusiasts—Arnold notes that as of its publication, he’d spent seven years and thousands of dollars on perfecting the gin and tonic, and he’s still not satisfied. In conversation he refers to the one on the B&D menu as “the current version.”

But the perfect G&T can only be achieved by recognizing what’s come before, and Arnold's thoroughness plays out in his role as one founder of the Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD), which opened in 2015. The Brooklyn space was born from his exhibit of over a decade ago at the Fancy Food Fair, which proselytized country ham’s place in American history. (“Before I was known for tech many people knew me as that guy who loves country ham” he writes on his blog.) That same year he began his job at French Culinary Institute (now the International Culinary Center), tasked with conceiving and developing its Department of Culinary Technology, the first of its kind.

But while it’s cool to have your Thai basil drink muddled with nitrogen, sometimes you just want a Manhattan. And Arnold knows this better than anyone. Below are the 10 drinks that inspired the curious mind of Dave Arnold.

Gin and tonic

Photo: Brendan Newell

I grew up watching my dad drink gin and tonics and I would join in: He would have the G&T, and I’d have just tonic. It’s one of the first cocktails I worked on at the French Culinary Institute, and is what kind of started my road into hardcore new technique cocktail working. The gin and tonic—I’m fond of saying—is so promising, but it’s just a crappy drink 99.9 % of the time. I wanted that ripping carbonation of just the tonic water, but I wanted it to taste like gin, and you can’t really get both (plus the lime makes it bubble, et cetera). So I worked on keeping the bubbles as intense as possible, and then worked on the lime, and then tried to tweak the tonic. I ended up trying a bunch of different techniques, and the gin and tonic that we have at the bar is kind of the latest. It’s Tanqueray, sugar, quinine sulfate, salt, and clarified lime juice, carbonated. So it’s super dry, and super simple.

Whiskey sours and margaritas (college days)

Photo: Facebook/Faith and Hope

In college I used to make two drinks for parties. The cocktail revolution hadn’t happened yet, and I thought I was pretty slick because I would make whiskey sours and margaritas. But of course they weren’t real whiskey sours and margaritas; they were a blender version made with Minute Maid concentrate. They were still a whole hell of a lot better than the Kool Aid monstrosity that other people were making with Everclear, though. I was making tubs, literally tubs, some frozen. I was the guy who played Ministry with a strobe light and a giant fan, and also served tubs of whisky sours and margaritas. That was my thing in college.

Manhattan

Photo: Liz Barclay

After college my future wife and I would always go out and get Manhattans. We thought we were really fancy getting them with really crappy vermouth, served in a classic nineties martini glass. In New York City we would go to the bar at the Marriott Grand Marquis, and it rotated. It was like an old-school carousel bar and they had a piano player there. And they had this amazing snack mix. You could watch the taxis go by Times Square, back when people could drive in Times Square. We couldn’t afford it but we would pay for one drink. We couldn’t afford to eat out at fancy places or anything, but that would be our fancy time.

Gin and juice

Photo: Flickr/Farther Along

The first drink that became a standard at the bar—which I still make based on the carbonation techniques that I use for the gin and tonic—was gin and juice. It’s the simplest thing in the world. I really like two-ingredient drinks, so it’s just clarified grapefruit juice and gin, carbonated.

Negroni

Photo: Flickr/mariobonifacio

I started focusing on more interesting cocktails when I began working at the French Culinary Institute. I took on a negroni habit at that time. Negronis are super popular now but they were one of the “with it” drinks sometime around 2000, 2001. You felt like if you were drinking negronis you knew something. Most chefs drink, but not a lot of them necessarily respect cocktails. But negronis are kind of a real cheffy kind of drink. So starting in ’04 when I started hanging out with chefs, a lot of people were liking negronis then. First of all, it’s a good drink. Second of all, it’s very forgiving. In fact, it’s almost forgiving enough for me to order in a place where I don’t know, trust, or care about anyone. I typically go even simpler than that when I’m out and I don’t know anything about the bartender and they don’t give me the impression that they care about what I’m going to drink. I get Campari and gin because basically any ratio of Campari and gin, if you squeeze a lime into it, tastes good.

Bananas Justino

Photo: William Hereford

The next big technique I experimented with after carbonation was the centrifuge technique, where we blend liquor and fruit with an enzyme called Pectinex Ultra SP-L, which breaks down the pectin. What’s cool about this enzyme that I figured out is that it doesn’t denature in alcohol very quickly, so you can actually do this to straight liquor. So the first thing I did this with was a rum cocktail called Bananas Justino. I always have a lime wedge to squeeze in for acidity, but I used to serve it sometimes with coconut water ice cubes, or star anise, but now we don’t. Now it’s just Bananas Justino, ice cube, lime.

Thai Basil Daiquiri

Photo courtesy Dave Arnold

The next technique I developed was called nitro-muddling. That’s when you freeze an herb with liquid nitrogen and crush it up, and then you add liquor to it. The liquor prevents the herb from getting all swampy and nasty from the enzymes that are in it, and also because you crush it very fine into a powder you get these amazing kind of punchy green colors, if the herb is green. I’ve done it with purple basil and it was super purple. The first drink I made that way is called the Thai Basil Daiquiri. It’s a daiquiri, which is a classic bartender’s test drink. If you walk into a place and everyone’s in the industry and you order a daiquiri everybody knows, “Oh that guy wants to see how I’m going to make a daiquiri.” The good thing about being that asshole is that even if you walk into a fancy place and they have this menu that’s all tweaked out, no one can get really pissed at you for ordering one, because everybody knows it’s a great drink. Except for those people who have only been to New Orleans and think that daiquiris are those things that come out of a slushy machine.

Sidecar

Photo: Flickr/Dana Moos

A fantastic drink. But I think rather difficult, because when you’re shaking a barrel-aged spirit without egg white, it can be difficult to get the taste of it right, and a lot of times when people make Sidecars they’re a little unbalanced, even though they’re fantastic. The whiskey sour is so easy because you put the egg white in, which softens the whiskey. Egg whites do two things: add textural effect to the cocktail, that kind of foam making it creamy, but also egg white is also neutralizing oak. Most brown drinks are heavy in oak. Most shaken drinks that don’t have an egg white usually aren’t brown barrel-aged liquors.

Penicillin

Photo: ramensan.com

I wish I’d come up with the Penicillin [the modern classic cocktail created by Sam Ross at Milk & Honey]. I think it’s one of the great modern drinks. People don’t understand that. I like it because I thought I was going to hate it, and then I loved it. Everybody likes that drink.

Italiano Staliano

I do a version of a frozen Harvey Wallbanger called the Italiano Stalliano. I like the technique of freezing drinks. I believe the original specs for the Harvey Wallbanger are orange juice, Galliano, and vodka—and I mean, could that be worse? The orange juice is too diluted, you can’t balance it properly. But there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Galliano. And Galliano and vodka is fine, and with orange, in order for it to be a good drink, you have to add some real acidity. But if you add some lemon, think about this: If you just take lemon juice, orange juice, Galliano, vodka, and a pinch of salt, then throw it in a Ziploc bag and into the freezer, when it’s frozen you just pull it out and dump it into a glass and stir it and it’s like a slushie drink. I came up with that drink for an Italian magazine, and then they ended up going out of business.

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